There are some gaming gems overseas, but unfortunately, we never get to play them. Publishers deem them too strange or too foreign to bring them ashore. But thankfully, downloadable content and a company called MonkeyPaw Games are changing that. The… Continue Reading →

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There are some gaming gems overseas, but unfortunately, we never get to play them. Publishers deem them too strange or too foreign to bring them ashore. But thankfully, downloadable content and a company called MonkeyPaw Games are changing that. The downloadable games aspect makes it cheaper to bring those oversea titles to the United States, and recognizing that, the PlayStation Store has set up an Import Section. Meanwhile, the other part of that formula, MonkeyPaw Games, has been helping those Japanese developers port those games over in an unadulterated form.
What gamers get is a weird mix of projects and nothing is stranger than Chou Aniki, a shmup of sorts. It's a game that's completely in Japanese, so I had a few friends who knew the language come over. One is an expert in these quick-twitch titles, and he gave me a quick translation about why all these half-naked men were flying across the screen.
Actually, it was more like commentary rather than explanation. "Oh we're going to fight this robotic naked dude now" was what he said. "Oh, there's a pyramid of half-naked guys coming our way," he complained. It's a little off-putting at first, but I should have been expecting it with a title that roughly translated to "Super Big Bro: The Strongest, Most Ultimate Invincible Man in the Milky Way.”
What makes it weirder still is that the graphics aren't pixels. They're digitized photographs of real people. The developer actually got muscled people to pose in their underwear for this. Players control a flying man in his underwear who shoots laser beams at other flying men in their underwear and floating heads. One of the saving graces is that you can fire through enemy bullets, making dodging some shots easier.
My buddy is an actually an aficionado at these games. He played his way through Deathsmiles on hard and he's the only guy I know who has beaten Sin & Punishment: Star Successor on normal. He breezed through levels easily and it was kind of weird but it was fascinating seeing the stages and enemies. It's nothing like a shmup we'd see here in the States. In fact, Chou Anikiis for all intents and purposes a train wreck, and like a ridiculous disaster, I couldn't keep my eyes off it. It was just so odd.
Once you get over the characters, the game's actually intriguing to play. You never know what kind of weirdness is next.
Gaia Seed, the other schmup that I downloaded, was more conventional. You control a ship blasting through space. There's nothing drastically different from other old-school schmups likeLife Force or Gradius.
It's fun and it'll definitely remind you of those old SNES/PlayStation days, but it's not balls out weird like Chou Aniki.
Since the initial release of those two import games, more titles have come across the PlayStation Store's Import Section. They include Alundra, which was originally released in 1997 on the PlayStation and brought over to the States in 1998 by Working Designs. But best of all, MonkeyPaw Games brought over Arc the Lad, a classic that was released in Japan, but strangely never made it over here as a standalone game. (It was included in Arc the Lad Collecion in 2002.)]]>http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2010/10/27/notes-on-oddities-in-playstation-stores-import-section/feed/22IMG_6897IMG_6901IMG_6904